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secondary market

For a significant amount of time Omaraha was one of the P2P lending sites that offered highest returns. This was largely due to the way their auction system worked – investor could essentially bid how much money they were willing to invest into a loan and at which rate. The system started filling the loans from bottom up (lowest to highest rate) and then the person taking out the loan got an average rate based off those.

This meant that if you kept an eye on how the loans got financed you could get into loans at ridiculously high interest rates while the borrower could still get a reasonable total rate. Best example of this is probably in the 7- and 10-year loans which have been removed by now, where investors were rather shy to commit, meaning you could get into loans at the max rate allowed – 60% gross (48%net for investor). This was also possible for 5-yr loans.

All good things must come to an end though, and the 7-yr and 10-yr loans were removed (largely due to the total rates failing to comply with the legal max interest rate limits) and the cap for max interest rates was also brought down, so you could no longer make autobidders with such insane rates. Good for the borrowers, sad for the investors.

Current situation

Somewhat as a result of those changes the average interest rates started to come down. A section of borrowers disappeared from site (those who got higher rate loans, but were no longer able to), and since the site itself had become much more popular among investors and the total available cash number kept increasing (up to 1mil at times), which started to push down the average rates.

As a result the drop has actually been rather immense. Another contributor has probably been the fact that Omaraha has elected to be less of a black box – before you had to take the time to figure out the interest rates yourself, now, however they show you the maximum rates that offer a chance to get into loans. Today’s stats:

As it stands, since the buyback rate offered (used to be at 80% for a long time) has started to slide back closer to 60%, then clearly the squeeze is two-fold both less security in buyback and lower interest rates. Since they’re also reduced the max amount per loan that an investor can contribute, this makes previous strategies much harder to use as well (it’s no longer as efficient to “ladder” interest rates for separate autobidders).

As a result Omaraha has dropped to somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to returns with one significant downside – lack of a secondary market, which means making an exit is much more difficult than on some other sites. As a result, for the first time in two years I’ve actually taken out some money since it started to build up too much.

It’s definitely interesting that after years of hoping and waiting for Crowdestate to open a secondary market, there are interestingly a few downsides to it that are tied to the current situation on site and the economic situation.

The good

It’s definitely good to have an option to sell investments. Due to a large amount of projects having a ~2year deadline, then the flexibility of being able to sell, means more people would probably have the courage to lock in their money into projects.

Also, the secondary market will be an interesting way to play around with increasing your earnings, people can be quite emotional when buying, especially since with CE projects the fear of missing out is rather big, so people might want to buy into deals if they miss it.

The bad

I think the biggest issue currently is the fact that adding a secondary market is likely to make it even more difficult to get into projects. People would be motivated to make multiple bids (automatic bids) through more than one account and then sell one of the pieces. I know that I had this idea, so I’m assuming others did as well.

This means that there will likely be even more autobidders active, which means that even less of chance to get into projects manually. One of the last projects listed was pretty much completely filled with automatic bids, meaning manual access was impossible.

While playing around like this means potential for better income (essentially making profits from reselling pieces), then I’m seeing a lot more disappointed investors who aren’t able to participate in projects. But who knows, maybe they’d be happy to have the chance to buy from the secondary market?

Overall, the best fix for this would be to have more projects listed to decrease the competition for investors to get into projects, but currently it seems like there isn’t much in the pipeline, and I’m unlikely to increase the amount I place per investment due to wishing to keep some level of diversification (currently capped at 500 per project) and therefore like most other p2p investors I’m also currently moving any free money to Mintos to take advantage of the cashback offers.